The tale may or may not have been intended to have a personal application, but Croppy’s fat scarlet face and yellow moustache, bristling beneath a nose which he must have inherited from his mother, did not lend themselves to a landscape background, and I fell to fugitive pencil sketches of the old white car-horse as he grazed round us. It was thus that I first came to notice a fact whose bearing upon our fortunes I was far from suspecting. The old horse’s harness was of dingy brown leather, with dingier brass mountings; it had been frequently mended, in varying shades of brown, and, in remarkable contrast to the rest of the outfit, the breeching was of solid and well-polished black leather, with silver buckles. It was not so much the discrepancy of the breeching as its respectability that jarred upon me; finally I commented upon it to Croppy.
“CROPPY.”
His cap was tilted over the maternal nose, he glanced at me sideways from under its peak.
“Sure the other breechin’ was broke, and if that owld shkin was to go the lin’th of himself without a breechin’ on him he’d break all before him! There was some fellas took him to a funeral one time without a breechin’ on him, an’ when he seen the hearse what did he do but to rise up in the sky.”
Wherein lay the moral support of a breeching in such a contingency it is hard to say. I accepted the fact without comment, and expressed a regret that we had not been indulged with the entire set of black harness.
Croppy measured me with his eye, grinned bashfully, and said:—
“Sure it’s the Dane’s breechin’ we have, Miss! I daresay he’d hardly get home at all if we took any more from him!”
The Dean’s breeching! For an instant a wild confusion of ideas deprived me of the power of speech. I could only hope that Croppy had left him his gaiters! Then I pulled myself together.